Israel, Suicide Nation
by M. Junaid Alamwww.dissidentvoice.orgMarch 29, 2004
First Published in Left
Hook

A nation which enslaves
another forges its own chains.

--
Karl Marx

Politics,
being the art of deception, must certainly recognize Israel as its Da Vinci.
Its smug self-portrait as a ‘civilized democracy’, rendered with brushes
dipped deeply in the oil paint of antipathy for Arabs, has won much
admiration among impressionable Americans. Galvanizing and amplifying latent
Western hatred of Muslim Arabs in order to rally the West under the banner
of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’, and intimidating doubters by abusing the
memory of the Holocaust to claim special ‘unique victim’ status, Israel
intones, ‘Stand with us because we are white and bomb towel-heads in
F-16s just as you do, and don’t dare stand against us because you
once persecuted our forefathers and should atone for your sins – by abetting
ours.’

The result of this most
cynical ploy is that the Palestinians, dark-skinned victims of Israel’s
perpetual campaign of ethnic cleansing, torture, theft, and humiliation, are
always grotesquely caricatured as mindless savages with a fetish for suicide
attacks. There is, however, one major credibility problem with this racist
rhetoric: Israel itself is in the process of committing suicide.

The trouble hardly stems
from any defect in Israel’s elaborate propaganda campaign. To the contrary,
its message has been widely accepted with fawning awe and reverence by all
dominant presses, pundits, and politicians, whose necks and knees strain
from displaying the proper respect accorded to the lies of the powerful. The
Israeli narrative, preserved, polished, and peddled by the generously-funded
pro-Israel lobby and various sycophants, has easily withstood the fleabites
of facts and evidence presented by critical Jewish- Israeli scholars,
historians, journalists and commentators, which go unnoticed in mainstream
discourse.

No, Israel’s crisis has not
emerged because its packaged lies have been unwrapped for the public by
sentimental sectors of corporate capital moved by the plight of the
oppressed, but rather because the oppressed themselves, viciously maligned
and virtually alone in their struggle for survival, have refused to bow to
the logic behind those packaged lies; that is to say, they refuse to be
exterminated, disappeared, destroyed, or spirited away, as Zionism has been
demanding of them for one hundred years. As one Palestinian recently wrote
in response to Ben-Gurion’s famous quip on expelling Arabs, (“The old will
die and the young will forget,”): “The old are dying, and the young are
dying too, but no one is forgetting.”

What is therefore falling
to pieces is not Israel’s ‘smug self-portrait’, but rather the cheap,
crumbling edifice of arrogance on which it and all the other aspirations of
Israeli colonialism are mounted. Propping up this arrogance in the past was
the basic assumption among Israeli elites that after enough murder, rape,
torture, bulldozing, looting, and expropriating, the Palestinians will
break. This prognosis has failed miserably. Compounding the original crime
of mass expulsion with more violence has not allowed Israel to escape its
consequences. Zionism’s “original sin”, as one Israeli historian calls his
nation’s original 1948 expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians and massacre
of hundreds more, is the basis of both Israel’s existence and the continued
non-existence of the more than four million caged, dispossessed Palestinian
victims who demand justice.

This demand for justice
expresses itself in continued endurance and resistance, separate forms of
defiance with interdependent consequences – consequences that Israeli
society cannot cope with and sees as its greatest threat.

Endurance means, first and
foremost, staying in place. Its greed for land and settlements partially
hindered by Palestinian presence, Israel has responded by robbing the
natives of any legal, political or human rights, and has constructed what
Israeli anti-occupation activist Jeff Halper calls a “matrix of control” to
stifle their lives, including settlements, military checkpoints, roadblocks,
curfews, embargoes, and detention centers. But merely living in this hellish
scenario constitutes a victory against the root logic of Israeli
colonialism, which is to ‘purify’ the land by removing its indigenous
population.

Resistance, on the other
hand, refers to active measures against the occupation. In the first
Intifada and in the beginning of the second Intifada this almost always took
the form of unarmed protest or stone-throwing, but Israel responded by
mowing down hundreds of Palestinians with machine guns and breaking their
bones, bringing in bulldozers to demolish homes and tanks to enforce even
harsher living conditions. Their restraint further rewarded with an
atrocious death ratio of 25:1, Palestinians tired of digging rows of graves
for their children and patriots just to be patted on the head by a few
polite Western liberals, and turned to armed struggle, the most extreme form
of which now manifests itself in suicide bombing.

The remarkable reality of
sustained Palestinian endurance and resistance in the face of overwhelming
power has precipitated two crises for Israel so entwined that they are best
referred to as a dual crisis: that of its political legitimacy and
self-proclaimed moral purpose.

Because Palestinian-Arab
population growth in historical Palestine (Israel, Gaza, West Bank) greatly
exceeds that of the Jewish population, Jewish majority status in the area -
assiduously obtained through a century of mass murder and mass expulsion -
will be imperiled and surpassed within a mere two decades. That these
growing Arab millions stand stripped of elementary rights and suffer the
deprivations of a racist military machine undermines Israel’s claim to the
mantle of democracy. Panicked Israeli protest to the effect that Palestinian
growth is some sneaky maneuver to “destroy” Israel only reinforces its
status as an apartheid state, since a democracy which fears the democratic
enfranchisement of half its population is no democracy at all.

Furthermore, Israel’s
viciously disproportionate use of force against all forms of Palestinian
resistance to the occupation has created a maximum escalation of violence in
which any citizen of Israel is now a potential target of weaponized
desperation – suicide bombing. Rocking Israeli cafes, discos, and streets at
will, this tactic has narrowed the 25:1 death ratio to almost 3:1, and
exploded Israel’s basic founding ideal – that it is a safe haven for Jews.
Indeed, Jews are now safer in almost any place in the world other than
Israel.

In responding to this dual
crisis, some in Israeli circles of power have expressed quite reasonable
ideas. Last September, Israeli politician Avraham Burg, former speaker of
the Knesset, declared his country was resting “on foundations of oppression
and injustice” and advocated full withdrawal from the territories to create
a Palestinian state. The same month 27 air force pilots, considered the
military’s elite, refused to implement assassinations, describing them in a
letter as “illegal and immoral attacks.” In November, four ex-chiefs of
Israel’s vaunted internal security service, Shin Bet, jointly declared
themselves against Sharon, the apartheid wall, and their country’s
“disgraceful” and “patently immoral” behavior against Palestinians, prompted
by concerns that “Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the
Jewish people.” In December, 13 reservists (including three officers) of
Israel’s top commando unit joined hundreds of other Refuseniks in refusing
to serve in the occupied territories, saying that they “have long ago
crossed the line between fighters fighting a just cause and oppressing
another people.”

But flirtation with
reasonableness by these small few stands in stark contrast with Israel’s
long-time marriage to racism, colonialism, and growing “fascist tendencies,”
to borrow Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling’s words. Representing these
tendencies are rightists at the helm of Israeli society - the settler
movement, military, and right-wing parties, spearheaded by prime minister
Ariel Sharon, a war criminal responsible for several bloody massacres that
have left hundreds of civilians dead.

Sharon’s ‘solution’ to the
country’s dual crisis is in the tradition of Revisionist Zionism, founded in
the 1920’s by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Italian fascism who wrote
honestly but with the aspirations of a conquistador-cowboy that Palestinians
“look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any
Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie.” One
disciple of this doctrine was Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan, who admitted,
“There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a
former Arab population,” and advocated the following method to expand this
theft: “[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument
with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward
this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers.”

The assassination of Hamas
leader Sheikh Yassin epitomizes and exemplifies this strategy for addressing
Israel’s dual crisis. While the murder of a blind, crippled,
wheelchair-bound quadriplegic outside a place of worship appears cowardly,
and the inevitable blowback against Israel gives the impression Sharon has
lost his mind, the strike is part and parcel of a consciously calculated
game plan that is perfectly rational within the framework of Zionist logic.
For the assassination of Hamas’ main symbolic leader is designed to provoke
it into an extreme ‘mega-terror’ act or a series of terror attacks, severe
enough to marshal chauvinist-Israeli support for a final solution to the
Palestinian problem – complete ethnic cleansing and removal of all Arabs
from historical Palestine.

This is not some imaginary
scenario, but a definite escalation of existing Israeli tactics. An attack
of September 11th or similar proportions would allow Israelis to heighten
their coveted ‘special victim’ status, bolster their image as fighting for
the ‘Judeo-Christian’ cause of the ‘war on terror’, and purge the
re-demonized Arabs without international interference. In one fell swoop,
Israel would be able to complete what it started in the 1948 war and its
dual crisis would be solved.

No serious person denies
that Hamas will retaliate; the organization has vowed to attack any Israeli
from Sharon on down and political analysts even within Israel recognize that
it is only a matter of time before it strikes. Nor is Israeli provocation
which aims at or leads to getting Israelis killed unprecedented. In fact, it
is commonplace. On July 22, 2003, the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronot
reported that the heads of Tanzim, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, approved a
unilateral cease-fire, and that former Palestinian Security minister Dahlan
had met Sheikh Yassin, who agreed to the cease-fire principles. 90 minutes
later, the same paper reports, Israel assassinated militant Salah Sheadeh,
“in the course of which dozens of civilians were killed and wounded as
well.” Israeli writer and professor Ran Hacohen noted that in November 2001,
“the assassination of the Hamas activist Mahmoud Abu Hanoud was carried out
just when the Hamas was respecting for two months its agreement with Arafat
not to attack inside Israel,” and that “in January 2002, the assassination
of Raed Karmi ended a few weeks of relative quiet in the territories.” All
of this obviously had disastrous consequences for Israeli civilians.

Then there are those
infamous media-created ‘periods of calm’ during which no Israelis die but
dozens of Palestinians are murdered and thrown into the trash heap of
forgotten history, such as August 1st, to September 1st, 2002 when 39
Palestinians were killed; 18 days later a suicide bomber exploded in Israel
– a ‘shattering’ of the ‘lull’. (Haaretz, September 2, 2002). Even more
telling is a study conducted by the Israeli weekly, Ha’Ir, of ten Israeli
assassinations against targeted Palestinian activists that followed periods
of relative calm (a revelation in itself), from July 31, 2001 to September
9, 2003. The results? In retaliations immediately following the deaths of
the ten targeted militants, a total of 180 Israeli civilians were
killed. (Ha’Ir, September 25, 2003)

This makes the results of
recent Israeli polls all the more remarkable, for they show not only that
80% of Israelis believe the Yassin assassination will increase Palestinian
terrorist attacks, but that 62% of Israelis support it. (AFP, March 23,
2003). Even a generous interpreter would have to admit that a significant
portion of those who predicted dire consequences from the attack nonetheless
approved of it. That Israel’s political strategy involves the jeopardizing
and killing of its own citizens, apparently with loud approval from some of
its own population, speaks volumes about its moral bankruptcy.

Along with this bankruptcy
comes a high degree of irony, since Israeli propagandists never tire of
demonizing Palestinians based on suicide bombings. Their smugness precluding
any possibility of sincerity, Israeli pundits ask, ‘Why do Palestinians blow
themselves up just to kill us?’, and always answer themselves (who else is
there?) in a somber tone as if they are suddenly concerned with Palestinian
well-being, ‘They place no value on their own lives.’ If given a chance, the
Palestinian native would respond, ‘If you would be so kind as to donate us
those tanks and helicopters you safely slaughter us with from afar, we would
be happy to spare you the agony you undoubtedly feel about our deaths.’

But it turns out that
Israel is now neither safe nor far from the reach of its victims, and that
its main strategy for addressing its problem involves exposing all its
citizens to injury and death just to whip up enough self-righteousness and
hate to repeat the cycle all over again until the conditions are ripe for
mass expulsion. In this sense Israel is akin to a guilt-ridden wife beater;
acutely aware of its own immorality, it provokes its victim into some futile
kind of resistance to inspire itself with enough hatred to justify
continuing the beating, awaiting all-out world war to finish the job without
eliciting much protest.

Many IDF officers probably
do not even see the demented logic of their own strategy and have convinced
themselves that it is beyond reproach. Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon and his
crew proudly announced that they plan to ‘liquidate’ the entire Hamas
leadership, removing those who train suicide bombers, and thus rid Israel of
Palestinian terrorism once and for all. What these fine gentlemen fail to
understand is that they will accomplish absolutely nothing of the sort. In
the Israeli daily Haaretz, September 14, 2003, it was pointed out that in
the past two years, the IDF had claimed to have killed or captured the
Hebron “head” of the military wing of Hamas no less than five times – and
each time it was a different person. Moreover, the notion that bombers need
to be ‘trained’ is absurd: how much practice does it require to put on a
bomb belt, walk into Israelis, and explode? All the ‘training’ required is
amply provided by the daily supply of Israeli atrocities that make one final
death appear preferable to a humiliating life in which one’s dignity and
hope are killed a thousand times over.

Ya’alon himself must know
this; a few months ago he declared that Israeli tactics were only creating
hatred. It is worth quoting one of the former Shin Bet heads, Major General
Ami Ayalon, on the subject: “Terror is not thwarted with bombs or
helicopters. Why does this increase terror? Because it is overt, because it
carries an element of vindictiveness.” Israeli elites who hope to snuff out
the Palestinian demand for land, freedom and justice by crushing the
Palestinians themselves should take heed: their history of vengeance is no
match for the vengeance of history.

For it is precisely the
vengeance of history that haunts Israel today; conceived and inserted into
the heart of the Islamic world at a time when Europe looked highly upon
colonialism, the memory of the Holocaust fell heavily upon its conscience,
and Muslims were politically weak and motionless, Israel’s confidence
appeared justified. But now, Europe has largely abandoned its colonialist
attitudes, Israel’s abuse of its vast military power has earned it the label
of the world’s greatest threat to peace within Europe and inverted its image
from underdog to occupier across most of the globe, and the first signs of
Islamic awakening and resistance, though often primitive and
backward-looking at the moment, are emerging.

Israel’s reliance on the
waning forces which precipitated its creation in its war against the very
people who were dispossessed during that creation has locked it into
a self-destructive dynamic. Its set of solutions consist only of increasing:
(a) colonial brutality by killing more natives, (b) sympathy for and anger
over Jewish suffering by getting more Israelis killed, and (c) prospects for
an intensified ‘war on terror’ in which anything goes and actions (a) and
(b) would be justified in the long run.

Plan (c) is certainly the
clincher in Sharon’s vision of purging the Palestinians, as he always
justifies his atrocities as complementary to the American-led ‘war on
terror’ and constantly advocates bringing this war to Iran, Syria, and
elsewhere. Thus from the Zionist viewpoint, America replaces Europe and its
crusade against terrorism substitutes for colonialism, allowing Israel to
thrive again. But Israelis who cling to this new savior fail to see that
this is only an escalation of and not an escape from the self-destructive
dynamic. Sharon’s decision to follow Dayan’s directive to “invent dangers”
by inciting and exacerbating the Islamic threat along with America means
that the whole nation’s very existence will be imperiled, not simply that of
a few dozen Israelis every few weeks, as is presently the case.

For assuming our ‘war on
terror’ is still raging two decades from now as desired by Sharon and
company, what will Israel do when it is surrounded by over 300 million
neighboring Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide? Does a sane nation of a
mere few million place its hopes for survival on the permanent subjugation
of a quarter of humanity that surrounds it? Israel on its current path is
like a man who swims off the coast into the ocean and happens on an island,
only to complain of being surrounded by water. Its citizens should start
asking themselves and their leaders, ‘What will we do when the typhoon
comes?’

M.
Junaid Alam, 20, Boston, co-editor and web-designer of new
leftist journal for American youth, Left Hook (http://www.lefthook.org).